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After seeing Diane Lane’s new cyber-thriller, Untraceable, I’m ashamed of myself—but not for the reasons that the filmmakers want me to be ashamed of myself. Mostly, I’m just ashamed that I actually had the audacity to hope that it would be more than just another bad January movie. Shame on me.
Untraceable taunts its audience with the promise of grisly on-screen death. It’s the story of a serial killer who slays his victims live, online, for all to see. The gruesome catch is that each visitor to the site speeds the victim’s death. Each new visitor releases a chemical or a drug, or it turns on another heat lamp, bringing the victim one step closer to an agonizing death.
Though the site is untraceable, FBI agents Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) and Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks) race to find the killer before another victim shows up on the site.
Sure, it may sound like a gruesomely suspenseful thriller. But once Untraceable lures its bloodthirsty audiences into the theater, takes their money, and offers up a couple of bloody, blistered bodies, it sanctimoniously slaps their hands and scolds them for paying money to watch people die (just like 2007’s The Condemned did). Now, I’m not saying that moviegoers’ fascination with bloody, tortured death is a good thing—but if I were making millions of dollars by capitalizing on that fascination, well, I think I’d probably just keep my mouth shut. You know, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you” and all that.
But preachiness is only one of Untraceable’s crimes. It’s also painfully predictable and torturously dull. If you’ve ever seen a crime thriller, you’ll know what’s coming around every corner. Sadly, though, the movie’s characters have apparently been too busy surfing the Internet for criminals to head to the theaters—because, despite the fact that they’ve supposedly undergone rigorous FBI training, they all seem totally shocked when the obvious happens.
If there’s one thing that’s truly untraceable about Untraceable, though, it’s the logic. After attempting to boast its own brilliance with a bunch of nonsensical techno-babble, it then proceeds to make one stupid move after another. When each new victim shows up on the killer’s site, for instance, the FBI’s conference room fills up with agents, all of whom sit around and watch the latest victim die instead of heading out to try to find the guy who’s responsible. And despite the fact that each new visitor to the site makes the victim die faster, the site is, for some reason, open on every single computer in the FBI’s offices—and, for those agents who happen to be out of the office at the time, on their phones.
Untraceable is, unfortunately, just one more in a long line of less-than-thrilling January releases. It’s unsurprising, unconvincing, and uninteresting—and it’s definitely unworthy of your time.
